The British Government's Censorship Superweapon is Operational
"Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational regulatory quango!"
I feel compelled to write a brief post marking the occasion of the British Government’s Online Harms Bill going live. I’ve spent the last few years watching it wriggle and crawl through legislative procedures, rewrites, rebrands, and debates with an overriding sense of futility and inevitability. The gestation is over, and the abomination is made real as an entity.
The Online Safety Act 2023 received Royal Assent and became law in October 2023. Thereafter, it remained within the womb of State bureaucracy, lovingly nourished, tweaked, nurtured, supplemented, and bulked up with codes of practice. The spawn of Ofcom, a Blairite quango responsible for regulating communications, the Bill was justified based on protecting children online, but absolutely nobody who was paying attention believed the blurb; instead, it was the most far-reaching mechanism of censorship yet devised.
In December 2024, Ofcom instructed everyone under the act to perform a risk assessment on the forums, sites, and blogs they hosted.
This guidance aims to help service providers regulated by the Online Safety Act 2023 (‘the Act’) comply with the illegal content risk assessment duties. The purpose of the risk assessment is to improve your understanding of how risks of different kinds of illegal harm could arise on your service, and what safety measures you need to put in place to protect users. It is compulsory that you complete an illegal content risk assessment to meet your duties under the Act.
To clarify, among the listed illegal harms is simply “hate”.
I hoped that the current vibe shift and the new American administration already calling out the UK and Europe for crushing free speech and over-regulating everything would dampen the Online Harms Bill. Ofcom would be reeled in purely for optics and geopolitical reasons. Alas, that does not seem to be where we are heading.
In mid-March, odd stories began to trickle onto social media that people who ran forums as benign as caring for hamsters or hosting cycling club groups had to shut up shop because they found it too time-consuming and laborious to comply with Ofcom’s regulations. I caught wind of it on the Lotus Eaters podcast.
Perhaps a regulatory crinkle and oddity? And at any rate, it was far away from our own corner of the internet. But then Andrew Torba of Gab posted this:
The same day, the gossip site Kiwi Farms was also targeted. The question arises as to whether both sites will be blocked in the United Kingdom due to their refusal to accept Ofcom’s diktats. I suspect that Gab and Kiwi Farms are relatively easy pickings for Ofcom. There’s a sense that the regulatory body is easing itself into its work by taking some shots out on the periphery. The net effect of what we have witnessed so far (it’s very early days) is that independent forums and sites will be crippled, forcing users onto Big Tech platforms where Ofcom can rely on their in-house censorship mechanisms. Ofcom seems primarily interested in destroying what remains of the “free” internet, and if that happens to include forums about hamsters or dissident social media sites, then so be it. If that is the case, then perhaps the censorship will subside.
However, if Ofcom is genuinely invested in clearing up "hate" and anti-establishment narratives that undermine the British Regime's values, sooner or later, there will be battles with Substack and, perhaps most incendiary of all, Elon Musk’s X. One has to wonder why X will not be asked to comply when Gab has been. The only difference is the amount of power that sits behind each platform. It is worth remembering that the Online Harms Bill is a relic of the pre-Trump 2.0 administration and is based upon assumptions that elites were comfortable with silencing the public. A scenario wherein American platforms, even minor ones, begin being blocked in the UK to keep us “safe” runs the grave risk of further undermining the already strained relations between Britain and Trump’s America.
We can but hope that common sense and freedom of speech prevail, yet the threshold has been crossed; the bill is alive.
I think what most disgusts me with this, beyond even the impact of it, is the sheer effeminacy of it all. The desperate attempt by the state to maintain a faux sense of consensus amongst the populace while literally every aspect of the country, from its economics to its demographics, burns down around us. All of these sly, fox-like mechanisms of control in our country, that increasingly resembles China without the prosperity, homogeneity, safety or honesty, strike me as exceptionally feminine: focussed on indirect manipulation of perception rather than open use of compulsion.
The problem our state will face is that this isn't the 90s. You can have this sort of sly manipulation-based control when things are basically sort of OK, and the problems lurking under the surface or in some colonised northern town are downers that the average member of the public would, in truth, rather not focus on. You can't have this sort of narrative-based control when you hit economic collapse, or when the violence on the streets becomes unavoidable, or when the average person is forced to confront the destruction of their way of life on a daily basis.
Of course, the state may then attempt to pivot to hard control, to a more masculinised version of this regime, but will it even be able to? It has spent the past 80 years repeatedly attacking every aspect of masculinity - from the role of the father to masculine virtues, like patriotism, to self-defence - for a reason: the fundamental legitimising principle of the post-war state is the refutation of the old, male, white, muscular Christianity that it replaced. Can you pivot to hard control and still maintain that legitimising principle? I doubt it. I can't imagine a 5 foot 2 female Indian police officer quite managing to club the populace into compliance. I guess time will tell.
Whether it's astroturfed Netflix shows for the regime to "react to," or the increasing risk of telling the truth.
Everything is geared towards pushing lies so blatant and nefarious that it seems the only job of the establishment is to keep the indigenous folk beaten down and silent.